With the death of Barbara Bush, much, though maybe not enough, has been made of her once-famous commencement address to the Wellesley College class of 1990. Read today it has the feel of an antique. But her voice is strong in it, and she was always worth listening to.
Wellesley’s invitation to Mrs. Bush was controversial, especially within the graduating class itself. To many of the seniors she was unqualified for the invitation because her prominence was derivative. She dropped out of college to marry her beau and never went back. She raised a large family while her husband climbed the greasy pole, leaving her alone in a scrum of squalling kids. With her husband’s success came her own. Her fame was as a wife and mother.
More than 150 seniors, roughly a third of the class, sent a letter to the school’s president. “To honor Barbara Bush as a commencement speaker is to honor a woman who has gained recognition through the achievements of her husband, which contravenes what we have been taught over the last four years at Wellesley.’’
Still, Mrs. Bush had been selected by a vote of the seniors themselves, and the invitation stood. Alice Walker, the novelist, had received more votes but she said no. Trailing close behind Mrs. Bush in the voting were Whoopi Goldberg, Glenn Close, and Connie Chung. Unlike her husband two years later, she managed to benefit from a divided opposition.
Her speech was closely followed in the press and generally judged to be a success. If nothing else, her gentle tone disarmed any protesters. It was so gentle indeed that lots of people failed to see how pointed her remarks were.
The graduates would face at least three big choices in life, she told them. The first choice was to devote themselves to something larger than themselves. The second was to live their lives with joy.
So far so normal. Alice Walker would have said the same. The third choice, though, had to do with where in their hierarchy of values they would place obligations of family, friendship, and work. Everyone knew where Barbara Bush, devoted wife and mother, had chosen to place her priorities. The passage was quoted often in the weeks that followed but merits reprinting at length:
These seemingly anodyne, Hallmark-y words, when taken seriously, are the most subversive words that could be uttered, then or now, on a college campus—a place where subversive words are supposed to be prized and protected but often aren’t. Mrs. Bush’s subversion wasn’t a matter of left or right, or even of feminism or traditionalism. She cut much deeper, into an American faith that transcends political categories.
This is the faith of careerism. For generations, career had been the guiding light of the bourgeois American male. Work came before family, even if work was done in service of family, as many men told themselves it was. The result was that fathers and mothers of the broad middle class lived separate lives: men at work, women at home to attend to domestic matters, kids above all.
Mrs. Bush understood that this division of labor, enforced through countless social customs and economic arrangements, was manifestly unfair to women who wanted something different, and no decent person could object to dismantling the barriers that stood in the way of their ambitions. But in this otherwise admirable goal, Mrs. Bush suggested, the advocates of women’s equality overshot. They went beyond making materialism an option to making it an expectation, perhaps even mandatory. They fell for the great lie at the heart of American business and professional life as men had lived it: that a single-minded pursuit of professional success was the surest source of personal fulfillment.
The lie was well known to be a lie. By 1990, we had already accumulated a vast literature about the soullessness of the modern corporation, the emotional poverty of “the organization man,” the terrible spiritual price paid for capitalist conformity. The best of the 1960s rebellion briefly understood this. But then came Reaganism, the valorization of the all-conquering market, the glorification of material advancement. When Mrs. Bush spoke to Wellesley’s class of 1990, many self-declared feminists had fallen hard for the unforgiving materialism of a liberal society and the market economy. Feminism itself got tangled up in a wan and desiccated view of what life is for.
Well, that was then. It was always a “First World problem” anyway, as we call them nowadays. The debate is long behind us. The materialists won. We’re all careerists now, men and women alike. The enormous success of Sheryl Sandberg’s chilling Lean In is proof of that. For Sandberg, the worthiest goal in a well-lived life will be found in the steady march through the cubicles of corporate America straight into the CEO’s corner office, or as near to it as you can get. Power is the object—power as successful businessmen have always defined it: lots of money to spend, lots of subordinates to boss around, nice houses, nice vacations, work, work, work . . .
To a life understood this way, the fulfillments that Mrs. Bush spoke of can only be incidental. Faithful friendships, a happy marriage, and the rearing of children might be pleasant adornments, as they were to the organization man, but their importance can’t be allowed to threaten life’s supreme goal. The self-denial required by a wholehearted devotion to them—on the part of men no less than women—costs too much in personal autonomy. Hence our declining birthrate, our declining marriage rate, the growing cohort of people who live alone.
It is good to be reminded of the Wellesley address, even on such a sad occasion, for it stands as an anticipatory rebuke to Lean In and the depleted idea of life that Lean In celebrates. To younger ears, Mrs. Bush’s speech must sound as remote as the transcripts of the Salem witch trials. We mourn the loss of the voice that uttered it.
